Score!

She was feeling spooked, however, because Rannaldini had nastily insisted she take off not just her regard ring but also her sapphire engagement ring.

‘It ees almost beeger than the evening star, and much too camp for a detective,’ he sneered. ‘Why not lend it to Baby?’

‘Look mean, Flora, cherie,’ shouted Tristan, ‘and when you see Carlos, shield Hermione and point your gun straight into camera.’

‘Stand by to shoot, please,’ bellowed Bernard.

Everyone moved out of shot.

‘Here we go, let’s turn over.’

And poor Flora was into a rat race. If she sang loud enough to have the right facial movements, the sound was too loud for her to hear the playback and she got out of synch. Alas, the promised voice coach had been sacked even before he’d started. Instead, to help her sing in time, and come in at the right moment, the video of Rannaldini conducting the score was now being relayed on a huge monitor behind the crew. This made her even more nervous.

She kept fluffing her lines, let alone remembering to look mean and shoot into the camera. Nor was she helped by planes going over, Griselda charging up to smooth her riding coat over the bulge of her gun, Lucy racing in to tone down her red nose with green face powder, Simone telling her to do up her top button, or Rannaldini continually shouting.

‘I don’t like hecklers, even if they do have cocks,’ she muttered dolefully. Then, just as she got things right, her mobile rang.

‘Oh, George,’ Flora burst into tears, ‘I’m a lousy actress, but I can’t talk now. I’ll ring you back. I’m sorry, everyone.’

Rannaldini went berserk. ‘Are you going to take this thing seriously?’ he yelled, grabbing her mobile. ‘Because eef not Gloria knows Tebaldo’s words and is only too ’appy to take over.’

‘Leave her alone,’ shouted Baby, who’d been crunching clove after clove of garlic in anticipation of his clinch with Dame Hermione.

There was a red glow on the horizon. The third lot of snow needed topping up, the day was running away. Blown like a dry leaf by everyone’s arguments, Flora leant against a tree, got lichen on her breeches and bollocked by Griselda.

‘Everyone hates me,’ she muttered miserably.

‘I don’t,’ said Sylvestre, who could hear her through the mike.

‘I don’t,’ said Rozzy Pringle, the former singer of Flora’s part, whose voice had broken down in the recording, and who’d just arrived to help in Wardrobe. Putting a little stone hot-water bottle into one of Flora’s blue frozen hands and a mug of hot Ribena into the other, she whispered, ‘You look chilled to the marrow, poor little duck.’

‘Oh, Rozzy, how lovely to see you.’

‘And you. Don’t cry, darling, your make-up will run.’

‘Ooh, that looks nice,’ called Hermione. ‘I’d like some hot Ribena too. Go and fetch me some, Wolfgang.’

Which made Wolfie hate Flora more than ever, particularly when he met Helen panting up the hill going the other way. ‘George Hungerford’s just called the house. He can’t get through. Can you tell Flora to switch on her mobile? He says it’s urgent.’

‘I’m not having any of those thoogs bullying you,’ were George’s first words, as Flora rang him on Bernard’s mobile.

‘Flora,’ snarled Wolfie, ‘are you going to hold us up all night?’

He wants to kill me, thought Flora. Even with a hundred people milling around, he terrified her.

The next day went much better. In the afternoon, they even filmed Carlos and Elisabetta’s first kiss. Baby’s attempts only to kiss Hermione between her jutting lower lip and her chin came to nothing: she sucked in his tongue like a Hoover.

‘Cut,’ shouted Tristan then took her aside. ‘As this is the first kiss of an innocent young virgin, cherie, I think it should be more tentative.’

‘That woman could suck Tasmania back to the mainland,’ Baby regaled an hysterical crew. ‘God knows how Rock Hudson did it for years.’

‘It’s called a Fontaineblow-job,’ giggled Flora, who’d regained her high spirits. ‘When the weather improves you’ve got to bonk her.’

‘That’ll be a piece of piss,’ drawled Baby. ‘When I was a little kid in Oz my parents were always sending me up chimneys. Hermione’s fanny holds no fears for me.’

23

The first weeks of filming were very traumatic for Tristan, and his good nature, particularly when large crowds, horses and hounds were introduced, was severely tested.

Extras, as Sexton was fond of saying, are more expensive than lawyers. Tristan planned to use much of the chorus’s already recorded singing as voiceover, and when he employed actual crowds, to keep down the budget by packing as many of their scenes as possible into the same day.

One of his problems was that Sexton had advertised for extras in the Rutminster Echo, and the same lot rolled up for every crowd scene, whether as poverty-stricken woodmen and their wives or glamorous French courtiers and ladies-in-waiting or suave dark-eyed diplomats from the Spanish delegation.

This was particularly apparent because Pushy Galore, one of the few trained singers used as an extra, pushed her way to the front in every crowd scene.

If any of the extras managed to have a word with Tristan, they could claim they had ‘taken direction’ and charge for extra pay. If they were filmed beside any of the stars, this could be categorized as a ‘cameo appearance’ and they received double pay.

One of Wolfie’s most important jobs, therefore, was to keep the extras away from the cast, which was particularly difficult the day Hype-along invited down a reporter from The Times and was bunging anyone he could see to ask for Dame Hermione’s autograph.

This was after a most unfortunate piece had appeared in the Independent headlined ‘Dame Qui?’ saying none of the French crew had a clue who Hermione was. Poor Hype-along had had to rise at dawn and buy up every Independent on sale at the Paradise village shop before Hermione could send out for one.

It was even harder to keep the extras away from Tristan, who was so polite, whose head was so much in the clouds, and who was so horrified by the way Rannaldini was shattering everyone’s confidence that he’d speak to all and sundry just to reassure them they were doing brilliantly.

As well as bellowing through his loud-hailer to the extras to keep back, Wolfie had to tell them what expression — sad, shocked, deprived, happy — to use. Uninstructed extras always look like the village idiot. Every week, Sexton came down with money in a Gladstone bag, new readies for the extras, used readies for Hermione. Wolfie had to distribute these.

The extras made their first appearance at a stag hunt through snowy beechwoods. A very mettlesome stag had been hired, and Baby and Flora made jokes about fast bucks, particularly when the stag took off into the forest scattering rustics and was last seen chasing ghastly Percy the Parson, who’d got a thumping crush on Baby after hearing him sing at Tabitha’s wedding.

Griselda, the wardrobe mistress, massive in a mauve boiler-suit, was having even more of a nervous breakdown than usual. She had spent days amassing clothes for woodmen and foot-followers that were suitably bucolic. Rozzy Pringle, her new PA, had spent hours labelling them with each extra’s name and hanging them on clothes rails.